Facebook must decide: Is it for the mob or for democracy?
The crisis in France shows the urgent need for pedagogy. But attempts to explain or educate have no chance to be heard. Political leaders should rethink their approach and Facebook should help.
In 2007, the newly elected Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa decided that for his reforms to succeed he needed to launch a massive education campaign. Building on the concept of “La Campaña Permanente,” he first decided to host a weekly radio show aired every Saturday for two hours (!) With his “Dialogue with his constituents,” as the show was called, Correa was able to explain in greater detail the reforms undertaken by his government. Unlike Hugo Chavez, whose television show “Alo Presidente” was a several hours long monologue mixing Marxist slogans and detailed accounts of his own diarrhea problems, Correa’s radio shows — relayed by 150 stations across the country — were aimed solely at spelling out his policies and securing public support. During his two terms (2010–2017), Correa did mostly well, sharply reducing poverty and inequality. The Gini Index, which measures inequality, dropped from 0.53 in 2007 to 0.45 in 2016 (to put things in perspective, in the United States the Gini Index stands at 0.41, it was 0.35 in 1979). Correa’s tenure was far from spotless, but his country improved in many ways.
Rafael Correa bears some resemblance to Emmanuel Macron. The Ecuadoran was 44 when he was elected, Macron 39. They are both the byproducts of the intellectual elite. Correa got a Ph.D. in economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and studied in Europe before landing a job at the World Bank. Macron was molded by the French Ecole Nationale d’Administration, like nearly every politician or public official in France. At some point, both were finance ministers in their respective countries.
But the similarity stops there.
After only 17 months in office, Emmanuel Macron finds himself trying to salvage his presidency. His ability to further reform the country appears compromised after five weeks of widespread and often violent protests with no structure, no leadership and no end in sight. Even after ditching all the contested energy taxes, no one sees what kind of presidential posture could defuse the crisis.
The reason for this disaster in the making is much less the reforms themselves — which are largely overdue — than the ability or the will to explain them (combined with an ill-advised sequencing.)
On November 27, a day after Macron’s convoluted speech about the “energy transition,” his Prime Minister, Edouard Philippe, admitted being “probably unable to explain the mechanism of the new tax regimes” concocted by a cohort of technocrats who never set foot outside Paris. None of their political opponents could have dreamed of a better caricature.
The crowd did the translation on behalf of Edouard Philippe in a rather stern way: the poorest segment of the population, living in rural areas and stuck with long drives to work, will have to pay more, and the diesel cars they were encouraged to buy will soon be legally obsolete, not technically, but by decree. That triggered the Jacquerie, which in France is a national specialty.
The most powerful vector for this disastrous failure of explanatory politics? Facebook.
In last week’s Monday Note, I explained how the social network is fueling the Yellow Vest movement by providing organizational support as well as an echo chamber for fake news and rumors.
The trend has not receded. The loudest voices on Facebook remain the most pernicious. On Friday, the network was filled with the rumor that by signing an international agreement on immigration, Emmanuel Macron was about to sell France to the United Nations while opening the floodgates for a massive influx of refugees. Evidently, no one took the time to look at the “Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration” as the text (PDF here) is officially called, a boring but innocuous document. Legitimate media organizations were prompt to debunk this nonsense. Nevertheless, the rumor spread like wildfire, fueled by the two main populist organizations (Rassemblement National for the far-right, and La France Insoumise on the far-left), which are happy to ride the wave (like in Italy, their convergence no longer seems a distant possibility).
Despite many efforts, in today’s unrest in France reasonable voices are lost in the uproar. It’s a question of numbers — or rather, the number of divisions, in Joseph Stalin’s parlance.
Each day in France, 43 million people connect to the internet, according to the audience measurement firm Mediametrie. Sixty-seven percent of them also log on to Facebook properties. That’s 29 million people whose newsfeed is most likely to be filled with the barking of the Yellow Vests. (As always on Facebook, it is fascinating to see your newsfeed turning yellow after just a few clicks and subscriptions to some pages that have garnered several thousand followers). Facing this avalanche, mainstream media struggle to be heard.
Publishers who had invested in a comprehensive social strategy are now less incentivized to push content on Facebook since the company announced a major change in the algorithm that rules what you see and don’t see on Facebook. At least, the company was forthcoming about this decision. It was explained last January by Adam Mosseri, the news feed manager at the time:
“With this update, we will also prioritize posts that spark conversations and meaningful interactions between people. To do this, we will predict which posts you might want to interact with your friends about, and show these posts higher in feed. These are posts that inspire back-and-forth discussion in the comments and posts that you might want to share and react to — whether that’s a post from a friend seeking advice, a friend asking for recommendations for a trip, or a news article or video prompting lots of discussion. (…) Because space in News Feed is limited, showing more posts from friends and family and updates that spark conversation means we’ll show less public content, including videos and other posts from publishers or businesses.”
Dear news media, consider yourself notified: your posts will have much less reach than they used to. The six largest media organizations in France had a cumulative daily reach of 12 million users, 41 percent of Facebook’s audience. The largest mainstream outlet in France is Le Figaro with 2.27 million unique daily visitors in October; Le Monde has 1.7 million daily uniques, not even 6 percent of Facebook’s audience. But even these figures are misleading: while users will spend more than 50 minutes per day on Facebook, they will allocate just a few minutes to news media. In reality, we are talking single-digit percentage reach for newsrooms that do their best to provide accurate and balanced views of events.
This imbalance of social vs. media also explains the inability to steer the debate toward reason.
Last week, the social sphere saw the mob coming with a set of demands allegedly backed by the “people.” The catalog would be comical if it were not a recipe for an economic disaster: Frexit of course, always a bestseller; massive hiring of public employees (in a country where public spending accounts for 56.5 percent of the GDP, 8 points above the EU average); a 40 percent increase in the minimum wage; better control of media to put an end to the “propaganda by editocrats;” immediate exit from NATO (that’s for Vladimir); unilateral default on the French debt; making “GAFAs” (internet giants) pay their taxes; exit from the Euro; a new Constitution, etc. All of the above were mentioned one way or another by the protesters I talked to over the past two Saturdays.
Had Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa been elected today, he would have looked at the following numbers: in an Ecuadorian population of 17 million, 80 percent (13.5 million) would be connected to the internet and 10 million (77 percent) of those would be on Facebook. Instead of radio or television, Correa would have certainly chosen the dominant social network as the prime vector for his Campaña Permanente to rally public opinion to his reformist agenda.
It is time for democratic leaders to adopt this strategy. Over the past two years, Facebook helped populist leaders in the Philippines, Brazil and the United States take power. In many countries, the network has been unwittingly weaponized by various groups. Now, if it wants to redeem itself for the damage it has caused, the social giant should build on its strong position to help democratically elected leaders counterbalance the digital mob and foster constructive debate. It might already be too late for Emmanuel Macron, but there is no shortage of democracies threatened by the dark forces of extremism to assist.
